It is one very easy recipe that I came up with recently. The secret of the taste is the spices. The recipe with the whitefish fillet was just the beginning of exploring combinations of flavors that make a pan-fried fish just taste very different from the regular fried fish where the predominant seasoning is salt. There was one slight problem with the whitefish fillet: the skin was too thin and the crispiness was not achieved. It tastes good anyway. The salmon fillets, however, have thicker skin and making them crispy was a piece of cake.
Ingredients
1 lb salmon fillet, cut in 6 oz portions
chopped scallions
chopped parsley
lemon juice
olive oil
salt
Preparation
- Portion the fillet. With skin side up, make cuts that are about 0.3″ deep and 0.5″ apart.
- Finely chop 1 scallion and a few Italian flat parsley leaves.
- Sprinkle some salt in the cuts that you just have made. Add the parsley and the scallions in these pockets as well.
- Squeeze some lemon juice on top of the fillets and drizzle some olive oil on the skin right before you put the fillets in a preheated pan.
- Place the fish fillets skin side down in a hot pan. Press the fillets lightly with your fingers. Cook until you see on the side that 2/3 of the meat has changed its color (about 4 minutes).
- Flip the fillets, and cook for 2 minutes.
- Afterwards, flip the fish again, so that the skin is facing the bottom of the pan and cook it like that for another 2 minutes before taking it out on a plate.
Notes and Tips: I used Atlantic salmon because it is cheaper than the one from Alaska. I highly recommend the wild Alaskan salmon: the meat is darker and the taste is very different but be careful not to overcook it as the wild salmon does not contain a lot of fat compared to the farm-raised salmon. You most definitely want it to be moist and tender.
